2024 was the year Elon Musk went from Bond villain to actual villain

It used to be fun to think of Elon Musk as a kind of comic book villain. Colonising Mars. Assembling an army of intelligent robots. Implanting “telepathic” computer chips into our brains. Each new scheme he cooked up was so ambitious, and so absurd, that it almost didn’t feel real. But over the last few years – particularly since his acquisition of Twitter for $44 billion in 2022 – things started to feel different, and the IRL consequences truly started to unfold in 2024.

Maybe the most obvious symbol of Musk’s transformation came this November, as Donald Trump delivered his victory speech toward the end of the US presidential election. “Let me tell you, we have a new star,” said the president-elect, amid a long and fawning celebration of the tech billionaire. “He’s a character, he’s a special guy, he’s a super genius.” 

It might seem like a strange choice for Trump to call Elon a “new star” when he’s been a very public figure, and one of the richest people in the world, for some time. It might seem even stranger given the pair’s history of public disagreements (Trump boasted that he could get Musk to “drop to [his] knees and beg” in 2022, after Musk suggested Trump should “hang up his hat & sail into the sunset”). But this only emphasises the extent of Musk’s reinvention from an eccentric, theoretically-liberal technocrat, to a central figure in an emerging right-wing “oligarchy” in the US.

How did this happen? After years of voting “overwhelmingly for Democrats”, what prompted Musk’s 180-degree turn? And what does his rising political influence – not just in the US, but across the globe – say about the state of where we’re at?

First, we have to go all the way back to March 2024 (yes, it already feels like 100 years ago). On March 6, Elon posts to X: “Just to be super clear, I am not donating money to either candidate for US President.” As it turns out, that was a complete lie. Campaign finance records filed on December 5 showed that Musk actually spent more than a quarter of a billion dollars ($277 million) to back Trump and other Republican candidates, making him the largest single donor in the election cycle. This follows his endorsement of Trump on July 13, a short time after the attempted assassination of the presidential nominee, and a livestreamed conversation between the pair on X (August 12) where they workshopped what would come to be known as the Department of Government Efficiency.

In case you somehow missed it, the Department of Government Efficiency or DOGE (get it? It’s a very, very, very clever reference to that one dumb dog meme) is a planned commission run by Musk and tech investor Vivek Ramaswamy. Together, the pair have discussed firing more than 75 per cent of the federal work force and shutting down several government departments, including the Department of Education. To be fair, this does fall into the category of big, wacky projects that Musk used to be able to get away with.

Anyway, to many people, Musk’s partisan U-turn came as no surprise. After all, it’s seemingly not the first time it’s happened. Despite promising to turn Twitter/X into a “common digital town square” for free speech across the board, Musk’s ownership appears to have seen “platform-level” changes made to boost conservative viewpoints surrounding the election of Donald Trump, according to a November 2024 study by the Queensland University of Technology. This supports other claims of conservative and right-wing bias from The Washington Post, Pew Research Center, and more.

Musk himself often boosts X’s right-wing conspiracy theories and misinformation – including the “great replacement theory” and anti-trans lies – by reposting them for his 200+ million followers, with a degree of plausible deniability. “Wow.” “Interesting.” “!!” As the media and democracy expert Paul Reilly told Dazed last month, amid a user exodus from X to Bluesky and Threads: “Twitter/X has arguably been an incubator for right-wing extremism since Musk took over... [his] claims that the site is a politically neutral world ‘town hall’ look rather hollow now.”

As if it wasn’t bad enough to have social media reimagined by a man who fancies himself the face of “Dark MAGA”, a damning investigation into more clandestine parts of Musk’s life exposed some troubling perspectives on free speech this year. In the podcast Elon’s Spies, journalists from Tortoise investigated a clear pattern of Elon suppressing his critics, using his own private surveillance network. In itself, it shouldn’t be too surprising that he dabbles in a spot of espionage – if you’re the richest man in the world, you need pretty beefy security – but the podcast illustrates how this “spying” often goes far beyond the billionaire’s safety remit, seeing private investigators target journalists, whistleblowers, online critics and personal acquaintances. Again, his comments about free speech ring hollow, raising the question: why did he actually buy Twitter?

For many, Musk’s motives seem fairly simple. As Kulvinder Nagre told Dazed in November, the businessman used X’s hundreds of millions of users to “leverage influence” with the upcoming Republican administration. Musk’s relationship with the US government is quite unprecedented in its scope and scale. According to the New York Times, his company SpaceX received at least $15.4 billion in government contracts over the last decade, heavily relied upon by NASA and the Defence Department. The rocket company has also faced numerous investigations by the US government, alongside Tesla, Neuralink and X, with Musk sharing scathing criticisms of his regulatory battles. Already, Trump’s team is looking to scrap a requirement for car companies to share crash data that Tesla has opposed. Putting Musk in charge of a government efficiency commission, as the NYT report notes, “would essentially give the world’s richest man and a major government contractor the power to regulate the regulators who hold sway over his companies, amounting to a potentially enormous conflict of interest”.

Of course, there’s the question of how much influence Musk will actually have when Trump enters the White House. Will he really be granted the freedom to make significant changes – to let the DOGE off the leash? Or will he be just another billionaire donor from the world of tech, hoping to buy a shred of influence with the incoming president? (Mark Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos, and Sam Altman have each donated $1 million to Trump’s inauguration fund.) In the final episode of Elon’s Spies, Tortoise investigations editor Alexi Mostrous suggests there’s some cause for concern. “We’ve seen billionaires before,” he says. “What’s unprecedented is this new combination of political power and immense wealth... Musk has combined control of a major social media platform, a $300 billion net worth, and insider access to the next president of the United States. The election has transformed this mere business mogul into a political giant. Elon 2.0.”

“Insider access” is putting it lightly. Musk was among a select few to join Trump at Mar-a-Lago on election night in November, and they spent “nearly every day” together in the weeks following their win. This included Musk sitting in on a high-profile meeting with Volodymyr Zelensky, plus conversations with right-wing politicians like Giorgia Meloni and Nigel Farage. Reportedly, he won’t be granted highest level government security clearance (reportedly this is partly thanks to his drug use and “regular” chats with Vladimir Putin) but it’s hard to imagine much will be kept in the dark if Musk and Trump somehow manage to navigate each other’s egos and stay friends for the next four years.

And why is Elon courting the likes of Meloni and Farage, alongside Germany’s far-right AfD party? Well, his political aims go further than the US alone. According to reports from Mar-a-Lago, Farage’s Reform UK could receive as much as £78 million from Musk as a “fuck you” to Keir Starmer. If true, this would be the biggest donation in British political history. He’s also supported Meloni in her hard stance on asylum seekers, drawing accusations of meddling in Italy’s domestic affairs.

You’d think that all of this political influence comes at a great expense, even for the richest man in the world. Since splashing out on Twitter and the election of Donald Trump, however, Elon’s net worth has only grown. According to Bloomberg on December 11, his wealth had spiked 77 per cent since the election of Trump, largely thanks to Tesla shares hitting an all-time high (as a result of the president-elect’s expected support). Today, he’s worth way more than $400 billion, and is a favourite to become the world’s first trillionaire.

Of course, Elon 2.0 has received some pushback, too. Millions of users have fled X for alternative social media sites, liberal Tesla owners are embarrassed to drive their own cars, and the art and activist group Led By Donkeys has projected a short film onto Tesla’s European HQ, spelling out the links between Musk’s Twitter purchase, the rise of far-right rhetoric, and the election of Donald Trump. (Watch above.) This loss of trust isn’t limited to the Twitter/X fiasco, either; if Elon’s proven himself dishonest in his fight for “free speech” and bias-free social media, then serious questions need to be asked about other parts of his empire too, like his monopoly on satellite tech, or the incomprehensible funds and energy poured into his AI supercomputers. It’s undeniable that Elon has played a significant role in some of the most consequential companies and technologies of the last 20 years, but that doesn’t mean he deserves a get-out-of-jail-free card.

Then again, even the pushback doesn’t really seem to matter. After countless broken promises and blatant hypocrisy, Musk is about to take a seat beside arguably the most powerful man in the world. With a post-X, right-leaning Musk standing very visibly at his side, Trump won both the Electoral College and the popular vote by a decent margin. In fact, Elon’s X bio, at the time of writing, reads: “The people voted for major government reform.” 

Musk’s flip-flopping over the years could be seen to suggest that he simply took a well-measured gamble in aligning himself with Trump in 2024: maybe he saw people’s anger at the status quo, guessed the former president was on track to win again, and decided to make the most of it. But it seems reductive to suggest that Musk is a mere opportunist.

The public’s belief in (and indirect votes for) the world’s richest technocrat comes alongside a fundamental shift in trust away from traditional institutions: legacy media, universities, and the political establishment. Admittedly, this shift is partly fuelled by Musk, but at least some of the blame has to lie at the feet of the institutions themselves. Things haven’t been working for a long time. So when a billionaire declares he wants to tear the government apart, and the public votes in his favour all the same, maybe that’s a feature, not a bug. What’s the old Silicon Valley saying? “Move Fast and Break Things.” In 2024, the American public proved its appetite for disruption, and if Musk gets his way, it won’t stop in the US.